ABSTRACT

TP’s bicultural concept creates a contact zone that fosters staff engaging with each other. The bicultural experiment that TP is provides valuable lessons for the burgeoning practice of decolonising museums, and a forum for identity politics, intercultural dialogue and indigenous museum practice. When Chief Executive Officer Seddon Bennington died suddenly in 2009, his tangi was a powerful expression of biculturalism at TP and resulted in a deeper appreciation of Maori cultural values among staff. Thus, understandings of biculturalism are more a matter of whether people are aware of the academic discourse and whether they are sensitised to the Maori quest for self-determination, than a question of ethnicity. Biculturalism is a ‘messy business’ and challenges an organisation on an intellectual level as well as in practical terms. Biculturalism, as the case study of TP shows, is much more complex and ‘muddy’ than academic discourse suggests.